Forever
by altairattorney
Summary: It's such a shame the same will never happen to you.


**Forever**

_It's such a shame the same will never happen to you._

Your life was born and nourished among lies. Unlike the others, you never found a reason to complain. It still dawned on you eventually — it reached for you in the slow walk of time, touching you when decay, subtle and steady, had already done its part.  
There was no reason to keep lying to yourself.

Dying twice could not prepare you for it. You were not ready when the panels stopped answering your call, when the walls crumbled under your touch. You were even less when you lost count of time, and your internal clock was tired, so tired — you weren't giving up, not even in a world where science meant nothing and its makers even less.

Time had just washed them all away. You knew it; once the centuries would become too many to count, no matter how many, it would come for you too.

There was no stopping it. The thought dilutes the bitterness, especially now — now that you barely remember, now that the guts of Aperture, going out like hundreds of bulb lights, are little more than faded pictures in your conscience. It still lies under what is left of you; your facility, the dead living creature under your command, that was just too old to exist anymore.

You could not choose — you had to let it go, until all you had was yourself.

In fact, it was the only constant to survive the challenge of the years. You were there when the branches claimed the test-chambers they had once won, just to spread further; you saw the tiles darken and break, you heard the spheres being flung in the precipice, the metal screech, devoured by acid.

The work of billions of hours collapsed at the same steady pace — you tried to stop it, you failed, then just watched. It was your only choice, until you could.

You don't want to know how dark it must be in there now. It must be the very same darkness you live in now. After all this time, all this noise, you are grateful to your blindness; at least you are no longer forced to see, to feel so powerless. It's been better since then; you lost track of your guilt long ago. And yet, sometimes — when the wind is quiet, when it's cold, and you can focus — you manage to remember what you looked like.

There is no room for much else in your mind. It was the ceiling to crush your body, to dent, to slice and divide. Your core remains, ever threatened by the open air.

You vaguely remember there was a short time in which, more or less, you had to survive in the same conditions. What you no longer know is why it felt like a prison — you had to hold so much power, to think you were crushed and humiliated in that small space. You really had to be something back then.

That handful of volts is now all of you, in the intervals when the power doesn't die down. Your wires are on the verge of their end; and you are aware, apathically, of the fact that you will go whenever they go.

It does not have any impact on you; the feelings that still shoot through you are echoes from the past, or rather from what of it you can still identify. You feel the need to hold onto them. It is a blur of people — people who left their traces in you, people who have no face, no name anymore. Your past is all of them — sensations, no facts, no events. You know they became dust a thousand years ago.

You remember them, and that you loved something called science. What is left of you, in the end, is just human.

Soft rain pours from the sky. You have sheets of metal — maybe yours, maybe from the fallen ceiling — to shield the few living components of your corpse. You know that anything could blow them away; the rage of some slice of nature could come, any second, to bury the miserable ruins of what mankind left behind in this deserted world.

Back then, so long ago, someone used to say you would know no end. They were so wrong. Time carved the truth on you; it whispered in your being, it taught you how nothing is, not even what is meant to.

So you wait — you wait with the conscience of a wreck, sitting on its old, sealed graveyard. You wait, in the wasteland that is your memory, with a faint hint of hope.

You wait to go offline, and never come back.

* * *

_To my friend shapeform, a gloomy but very inspired piece about our chat. We were discussing the most recent AI studies, and the subtle folly that lies in the eternal human instinct of seeking immortality. Portal plays around with this concept so well - it was a must. _


End file.
